This is one of the weirdest combinations of brain-freeze and arcane knowledge I've seen in days:

"didn't the guy who played Jethro on "The Beverly Hillbillies" also play his twin sister, Jethrine"

(Max Baer, Jr.)

They correct at least two errors and respond on the letters page?

Where were they when people were begging them to explain wtf with Kansas O'Flaherty?

"Play the game or read a book," my ass.

I was teaching at a major university a few years back. The cheerleaders in my class taught me that (a) they are a lot smarter than the nitwits they are portrayed to be in movies, and (b) that they are among the fittest athletes on campus. One of them, a woman who had to keep her body fat down below some ungodly level--it was like the body fat of a carrot--mentioed how it was a real bitch going to the weight room whenever the football team was in there, because, as she said, "You want to lift some, and there are all these linebackers checking out their titties in the mirrors."

In our culture, it's not embarrassing to be dopey. That's a bad thing.

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So where is Salon's regular column on wicked smart English and chem majors?

I am always suspicious when somebody purports to allude to Joyce (e.g., Luka Bloom, who had not, at the time of his name change, actually read Ulysses--he just thought Poldy;s named sounded cool).

Can you show me some of those puns, etc--because, frankly, the Steven D. Dallas thing seems kind of Luka Bloom-y to me.

And goodceleryexclamationmark is indeed a bore. See my earlier references to his better, the man from whom he "borrowed" (heh-heh) "his" (ho-ho) "style" (ha-ha).

I quote myself:

"Just glancing at Goodceleryexclamationmark's 319 letters (!!), I'd say that he or she is more likely a plagiarist [than Boopie-doop], a too-rational sucker for Be-Bop's sub-Joycean affectations who has too much self-respect to commit to Be-Bop's nonlinearities well enough to do the job exactly right."

I now rescind the "too much self-respect" remark.

Use of said term in 2008 explains a lot (as does ending a message with "LOL").

This reading of the essay takes a fairly interesting premise--that books are windows to the soul--and mis-reads it as Girly-Girl Book Club piffle.

Two paragraphs:

. . . to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

Have I got the girl for you!

(Do you like Dickinson and Neruda?)

Like windsurfing, for instance. Nobody's going to rag on you if you windsurf.

White guys with guitars. YAWN

If you are going to kiss up to Garry, at least spell his name right. Be-Bop would've.

kitchengirl quotes and writes:

"'I have a 2006 Prius and the gauges are behind the steering wheel, like on every other car.'"

"'Like on every other car?'" Smug much?

1. "Smug"? Did you mean "Unobservant"? How does placement of gauges denote extreme self-satisfation?

2. The sentence structure "X much?" is so 2003.

3. "X is so YYYY" is totally 1998.

Why would a "specialist in Victorian literature" at a major university be standing in front of a board with anything about Spencer (heh-heh) on it? Is Quaid's character teaching surveys WAY out of his field? Do all hotshot profs at Carnegie-Mellon do that?

If he is grieving for his wife, is there any chance at all that this smart Victorianist mistily quotes In Memoriam?

What is it when you stand aside and watch an injured person crawl the bases? She was, as she seemed ready to do, entitled to go around the bases on hands and knees--no time limit, take her own bloody-palmed and skinned-knees time--so what the opposing team did was, in fact, not only good sportsmanship (sic), but politically astute: rather than showing up on Sports Center as exemplars of what makes America sport great (at least in theory), they would have shown up, arms crossed and gazing blankly as another kid gutted it out, as the World's Biggest Dickheads (again, sic).

Sometimes it is.

Sports is one of the few arenas left where we are likely to see grace in action.

In Act Eleven, Scene Five of As You Like It, William Shakespeare did not use the twentieth-century lawyers' term he/she.

If banal stalk! (ineptly) cite chapter and worse (or be act and scene?), eggslingerexclaymationmark glom the bibliograffical necessitationmade? Quoth acquarkly? Profread? Punk-two-eight eggsightedly?

Kerflunk!

English enough for you?

And I am not a "he."

1. Go to Google Map.

2. Enter "Dice Kentucky."

3. Look at the map! Pristine, huh?

4. Now switch over to Satellite and see what God sees.

Sunday night is when I wash my dainties.